Super Hornet and Growler sustainment contract signed

The federal government has signed a new contract for the provision of sustainment services for the F/A-18F Super Hornet and the EA-18G Growler airborne electronic attack aircraft, Minister for Defence Industry Christopher Pyne announced during a visit to Brisbane.

The contract is valued at about $264 million for an initial five-year period; the arrangement with Boeing Defence Australia involves subcontractors including Raytheon Australia, Northrop Grumman Australia and Pacific Aerospace.

Minister Pyne toured RAAF Base Amberley and received briefings from Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) commanders.

“It is a fantastic opportunity to visit RAAF Base Amberley, not just because it is important for me to understand how the Air Force manages its operational capability, but also how Australian industry provides the support we rely on,” the Defence Industry Minister said.

Pyne also met with a number of defence industry businesses, organisations and Queensland state government representatives, and visited small arms and ammunition supplier NIOA.

The real overall winner is the taxpayer with this capability.To all you people who knock the rhino.I spoke with an ex AVM at Avalon in 2015.He said no one in the civvy world knows how good this jet really is.

Yes the F/A-18F ‘Rhino’ is a good aircraft, certainly for the here and now and probably up until the early to mid 2030’s, but why invest even more dollars in a 4.5 Gen aircraft that is getting to the end of it’s production run sooner than later? Why?

And yes purchasing more would eat into the F-35A (5th Gen aircraft) program for the RAAF, or some other program that would have to get the chop to pay for them, the Defence pie is only so big and can only be sliced in so many ways, how do we pay for them? And lets not forget the cost of basing, air/ground crews, etc, etc, too.

As for the ‘Advanced Super Hornets’, they do not exist, it is a Boeing ‘concept/proposal’, the so called ASH demonstrator that Boeing presented a few years ago was in fact a ‘standard’ Super Hornet with dummy conformal tanks, weapons pod, etc, and all the other ‘ASH’ components, upgraded engines, cockpit upgrade, also didn’t exist and still don’t.

Unless the USN adopts components of the proposed ASH, such as conformal tanks, then we are very very unlikely to ever see them flow through to the RAAF’s fleet, the RAAF made it very clear when they purchased the Super Hornets, that they would be maintained in ‘exactly’ the same configuration as USN Super Hornets, for all the obvious reasons of future ‘common’ support and maintainability, etc.

Harry,

The Rhino (F/A-18E/F Super Hornet) is not restricted to just the US and Australia, Boeing has (and continues) to try and flog it around the world, no takers as yet though.

On the other hand the ‘Growler’ (EA-18G), has only been released for export outside of the US to Australia only, that is true,

Ok true that. We are going to have to wait till the f/axx comes out, Im guessing Australia is in the program. Although it comes around 2030 and will probably replace the super hornet. But man the 4++ generation aircraft of the future would do damn good.